The book delineates rational and non-rational motivations or triggers associated with each type of thinking process, and how they complement each other, starting with Kahneman's own research on loss aversion.

The book was a New York Times bestseller[4] and was the 2012 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public understanding of topics in behavioral science, engineering and medicine.

[5] The integrity of some priming studies cited in the book has been called into question in the midst of the psychological replication crisis.

Terms and concepts include coherence, attention, laziness, association, jumping to conclusions, WYSIATI (What you see is all there is), and how one forms judgments.

It begins by documenting a variety of situations in which we either arrive at binary decisions or fail to associate precisely reasonable probabilities with outcomes.

Kahneman and Tversky originally discussed this topic in their 1974 article titled Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that occurs when people make judgments about the probability of events on the basis of how easy it is to think of examples.

An alternative interpretation is that the subjects added an unstated cultural implicature to the effect that the other answer implied an exclusive or, that Linda was not a feminist.

The planning fallacy is the tendency to overestimate benefits and underestimate costs, impelling people to begin risky projects.

He explains that humans fail to take into account complexity and that their understanding of the world consists of a small and necessarily un-representative set of observations.

[13] According to Kahneman, Utility Theory makes logical assumptions of economic rationality that do not represent people's actual choices, and does not take into account cognitive biases.

Consistent with loss-aversion, the order of the first and third of those is reversed when the event is presented as losing rather than winning something: there, the greatest value is placed on eliminating the probability of a loss to 0.

After the book's publication, the Journal of Economic Literature published a discussion of its parts concerning prospect theory,[14] as well as an analysis of the four fundamental factors on which it is based.

Kahneman suggests that emphasizing a life event such as a marriage or a new car can provide a distorted illusion of its true value.

[30] In March/April 2012 issue of Bookmarks, the book received a (4.00 out of 5) with the critical summary stating, "Either way, it's an enlightening tome on how--fast or slow--we make decisions".

The ways of thinking described in the book are believed to help scouts, who have to make major judgements off little information and can easily fall into prescriptive yet inaccurate patterns of analysis.

[48] The last chapter of Paul Bloom's Against Empathy discusses concepts also touched in Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that suggest people make a series of rational and irrational decisions.

For example, when someone has to make a big life decision they critically assess the outcomes, consequences, and alternative options.

[49]: 230 Author Nicholas Taleb has equated the book's importance to that of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.

An analysis[51] of the studies cited in chapter 4, "The Associative Machine", found that their replicability index (R-index)[52] is 14, indicating essentially low to no reliability.

[54] A later analysis[55] made a bolder claim that, despite Kahneman's previous contributions to the field of decision making, most of the book's ideas are based on 'scientific literature with shaky foundations'.